DIY Homeschool Health

I had a running joke my first year of homeschooling: Yeah, we cover health. We wash our hands everyday. While I knew health was important, our child-led learning, let’s-forgo-formal-curriculum approach meant I wasn’t going to shell out $50+ for fancy book covers and unnecessary worksheets that no one would want to do.

So, I did a little research to understand what exactly makes up a health curriculum. Come to find out, health covers more than just the food pyramid – Just Say No – and pregnancy prevention.

Having a sense of umbrella health topics, it was easy to start brainstorming age-appropriate ideas of specific “lessons” I would want to cover. Instead of trying to create 13 different lists (one for each year of K through 12), I focused on topics that I wanted to complete over a period of 3-4 years.

As I started creating lists of learning objectives, it became more and more apparent that much of what we call “Health Education” is really practical life skills. Teaching these skills doesn’t require a textbook. It requires hands-on practice with learning how to take ownership and responsibility for one’s life.

Take Safety, for example, and how to handle a situation if you get lost. We homeschooled Health on one of our first trips to an amusement park when the kids were about 5 years old. After getting our tickets and before our first ride, I found a security guard walking by. We stopped the person to say a friendly hello and I asked (in one of my Mamma voices), “Are the person we would ask for help if we got lost from our group?” After a few more friendly words we were on our way.

We also reviewed our general rules for what to do if you’re lost in public.

Me: If we get separated, do you run around and look for me?
Kids: No.
Me: What do you do to get help?
Kids: We plant our feet like trees and we don’t leave with anyone offering to help, except a police officer.

By middle school, that conversation morphed into: “Where do you think is a good meeting spot, in case we get separated?”

Over time the list of Health learning objectives grew. Sometimes I didn’t even know we were homeschooling Health until later when I was making some notes for our portfolio and I realized, “Yeah, learning how to pick fresh fruits and vegetables from the ones on the verge of going bad in the grocery store definitely falls under the Healthy Eating umbrella.

alessa

Alessa Giampaolo Keener, M.Ed. works with clients around the world in developing individualized learning plans that value the strengths and weaknesses of the whole child. While her focus has long been on the social-emotional needs of the gifted child, Alessa also works with governmental agencies in helping to meet the educational needs of children in foster care, as well as those involved in the juvenile justice system. Alessa lives in Maryland, where she homeschooled her kids into college. You can email Alessa at alessa.education (at) gmail.com

I think Health tends to get overlooked in education as the back-burner subject we get to when we get to. I like how you’ve broken up this (much larger than I’d realized) set of topics into very practical and attainable learning objectives.